Christina Toren

Mind and Inter-Subjectivity: An Anthropological Perspective

This paper argues that mind is a function of the whole person that is constituted over time in inter-subjective relations with others in the environing world. In this view, consciousness is that aspect of human autopoiesis that, with time, posits the existence of the thinker and the conceptual self-evidentiality of world as lived by the thinker. Given that human autopoiesis is grounded in sociality, i.e., that we cannot conceive of what a human being would be outside social relations, a brief excursion into Fijian ethnography is included to suggest why it makes sense to study child development as a microhistorical process in and through which mind is constituted over time as a function of inter-subjectivity. The paper proposes a model of the process of constituting mind, and consciousness as an aspect of mind, that is derived from a synthesis of certain of the ideas of Maturana and Varela, Piaget, Merleau-Ponty, and Vygotsky.

A matéria da imaginação: o que podemos aprender com as ideias das crianças fijianas sobre suas vidas como adultos

By means of an analysis of Fijian childrens essays about the future, this paper explores ideas of sociality, personhood and the self that are the very stuff of intersubjectivity and thus of the imagination. The material presented here bears on a single aspect of data derived from 75 essays by Fijian village children aged between 7 and 15 years old collected in April 2005: their constitution over time of a spatiotemporal orientation towards a view of generations to come. This partial analysis is the first part of the larger project, which will look at all aspects of the data derived from the essays as they vary together. The paper uses this example of spatiotemporal orientation to show how, seen through the perspective derived from long-term participant observer fieldwork, data such as these enable an ethnographic analysis of meaning-making as a transformational, historical process.